2. 9 Free Photoshop brush tips   

So with the brush tool selected, go to Window/brushes (or F5) which opens the 'Brush Palette'. Choose, for example, a fairly large, hard edged brush.


Picture 1 - shows our hard edged brush stroked firstly with a mouse then with the tapered elegance created by using a stylus. 

With the 'Brush Palette' open it's here's where you can choose the size and style of brush from the drop down list. Make sure you take note of the mini palette called 'Brush Presets' as this is where all the brush alchemy takes place. 

 With 'Brush Tip Shape' selected, look at the bottom of the long palette and you'll see controls for brush spacing, brush size, softness and brush angle controls. To squidge the shape and angle of the brush (not terribly useful, but you may as well know how) use the cross hair control. 

All the changes you make get a mini dynamically updated window at the base displaying your current brush stroke. 

Picture 2 - shows how the round brush has been squidged, more obviously apparent when painting in various directions. 

As you paint with any brush, Photoshop spits out a series of dots of 'paint' at regular intervals. Lots of frequently emitted dots produces a solid line of paint. But if you slow down and control the frequency of the dots, you'll get...a dotted line. 

Picture 3 - painting with regular dots at regular intervals is ok for regular graphic and decorative work, but if you're striving to get 'natural,' then we need to mix it up with a few random factors. Let's make our rows of squashed dots become random sizes.

continues next page ...